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Azure Stack is a game changer in hybrid cloud

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According to Gartner, a corporate "no-cloud" policy will be as rare by 2020 as a "no-internet" policy is today. The question is no longer if you will move to the cloud so much as when and what technologies you will leverage for your cloud transformation.

Many companies are looking at the public cloud and deciding that it isn’t the solution for all their data and apps. Whether it be compliance, regulations, governance or simply corporate policy, many companies have specific data and apps they want to keep onsite. Others find themselves in a situation where they are not always connected to the public cloud and need an alternative solution. The result is the use of a public cloud and a private cloud, an approach known as hybrid cloud.

To date that has meant the difficult ask of integrating your onsite approach with the technologies of a public cloud provider. With Microsoft Azure Stack providing a true hybrid cloud experience, bringing the two cloud environments together just got easier. Microsoft is the first and only cloud vendor to make their public cloud technology available in an on-premises model. The benefits of Azure Stack are game changers for hybrid cloud.

The benefits of an Azure-consistent experience

The biggest advantage of Azure Stack that is changing hybrid cloud is the simple fact that for those utilizing Azure, they can now have an on premises, private cloud that delivers an Azure-consistent experience. The complete set of Azure hybrid capabilities includes uniformity across identity, security & management, data, and application platforms. This means you can modernize applications with a single development cycle and a single testing cycle and then deploy to either or both environments and be confident it is going to work. This dramatically simplifies the process of managing two cloud environments.

Access to pre-built solutions for use onsite

The Azure-consistent experience carries over as Azure Stack can leverage thousands of pre-built solutions from the Azure Marketplace, opening the door for companies working on-premises to benefit from solutions only available in the public cloud. This includes open source tools and technologies, as well as enterprise applications that have been certified and optimized to run on Azure. The availability of these solutions in an on-premises environment creates an opportunity for companies to deploy and build on cloud technologies knowing that they can later seamlessly migrate them to the public cloud. Over time they can then decide which applications need to move to the public cloud and which ones can remain in the private cloud.

Service provider model insures expertise

Microsoft is making Azure Stack available through a limited number of vendors, Avanade being one of them, all of whom are running pre-certified hardware that has been purpose built. Vendor provided cloud stacks seem to be what companies want based on their response in an Avanade IT Modernization Study where 87% agree that their organization is planning to implement vendor-provided cloud stacks to integrate their on-premises data center with the public cloud. Further, 81% say experience in cloud migration is a key element desired in a vendor supporting their IT modernization. With an extensive history of delivering successful Azure solutions to clients, we are uniquely positioned to do the same with Azure Stack.

Azure Stack, coming soon and must see!

Microsoft hasn’t made Azure Stack generally available yet, but all indications are that it is coming soon. When it is available, companies with hybrid cloud needs should take a close look at it because it will change how you do hybrid and will deliver the flexibility, agility and control that you need to modernize your IT infrastructure by leveraging the best in cloud technologies.

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